Can't comment on this other than that I came in at WCIII RoC and played TFT. Before that, I played a lot of Command & Conquer. I loved those games, so for me WCIII is the apex. I didn't like StarCraft. But it's admittedly the apex for me without having ever played WCII. I've rarely seen it as well.
I started playing at WCIII TFT too. it is personal for me too. so many good memories.
i did play some brood war after i played tft with some of my tft clan mates and i didn't really like it. i think i prefer micro over macro, at least at the time. whenever i play dota 2 nowadays, i am much more macro oriented but that might be because i got much better than 18 years ago lol.
i also kinda really emotionally, outside of gameplay, like wciii because of the dota connection if it wasn't obvious. seeing the OpenAi bots compete against pros live was such a surprise. I lost it at that TI.
wciii enabled this by being so open. the world editor was incredible. and the game allowed so much functionality cause it allowed integration with ghost++. the community was really in it. wcreplays was a wonderful website where the community was constantly sharing replays, and I loved to watch random FFAs and people doing their own casts. One of my coworkers at my first internship ever actually did his own casting as a hobby.
i just love the game. not just because it was fun, but also because it was such a huge part of my technical/creative life when i was a kid and it still kinda is through dota. i once did a blog post in 2017 showing a light demo of generating item builds with LSTMs, and dota plus the following year added it as a feature. in my mind i hope they saw my blog post, and it inspired them. at the time, it was such a huge validation that i had good ideas for game development, and it made me feel pretty proud that I could contribute something to the game like so many others did.
